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Sunday, 7 July 2013

During prohibition in the USA in the 1920s many people were poisoned and died due to alcohol that had been produced in sub-optimal conditions and in some cases had been adulterated with various chemicals. It was an obvious consequence of the fact that the trade in a substance that millions of people wanted had been driven underground.

People like to describe this sort of thing as an "unintended consequence". Their argument is that they are trying to stop the trade in substances they have decided to outlaw and that they do not intend people to die as a result.

Since the "War on Drugs" started in the early 1970s there have been countless thousands of people who have died due to taking what they thought was one substance but was in fact another. Or they thought it was of a particular concentration but it turned out to be much stronger than they had realised and by the time they did it was too late.

Imagine if you went down to a shop to buy a bottle of alcoholic beverage and instead of it being labelled "Wine" or "Whisky" or "Vodka" along with a clear ABV percentage (e.g. 13.5% or 40%) instead there was no label and you had no idea what was in the bottle. It might be something that is around 10%. It might be 40%. It might be 80%. There is no way to tell. Also, you think it contains an alcoholic drink but it might instead contain something that if ingested even in small amounts would kill you.

That's analogous to the sort of situation that people who take drugs in this country regularly face. Most of them get lucky. But some of them do not.

The simple fact is that exactly like they found in the USA, prohibiting a substance drives trade underground and quality control goes out of the window. By 1933 the US had learned the horrible lessons that prohibiting alcohol had caused far more problems than it solved and reversed the law in short order. But we are still to learn the lessons regarding drugs more than 40 years on from their prohibition.

There have been so many deaths like those in Scotland recently that I am no longer willing to accept the term "unintended consequences" to describe them. I would not go so far as to say our politicians want these people to die but it is clear that they see them as some sort of collateral damage in the "War on Drugs". They are not collateral damage. They were human beings with thoughts, feelings, friends and family exactly like you and I.

It is nonsensical to declare war on a substance. The "War" if it exists at all is on our own citizens, particularly our young and often very vulnerable citizens. They bear the brunt of the poison they put in their bodies due to lack of any sort of quality control. They serve the time in prison if they are caught with "controlled substances" and have their future prospects utterly ruined.

It is time to recognise that criminalising substances that people want to put into their systems simply makes the problem worse. Much worse.

It only took 13 years for the Americans to realise this in relation to alcohol. I really do wonder why it has taken more than three times as long (and counting) when it comes to other substances. Because the problem is exactly the same.

2 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Imagine if you went down to a shop to buy a bottle of alcoholic beverage and instead of it being labelled "Wine" or "Whisky" or "Vodka" along with a clear ABV percentage (e.g. 13.5% or 40%) instead there was no label and you had no idea what was in the bottle. It might be something that is around 10%. It might be 40%. It might be 80%. There is no way to tell. Also, you think it contains an alcoholic drink but it might instead contain something that if ingested even in small amounts would kill you.

Then if you're stupid enough to drink it you deserve whatever you get, don't you?

Thanks Anonymous, and when people used to buy "bread" that was adulterated with chalk or sawdust or ergot, they deserved what they got.

Of course that is not a fair comparison to employ, as your comment is apparently about people who buy teh eevil druks and so deserve to die or be maimed without the rest of us being too bothered about it. (Or were you just recommending that they should get to know their local, artisanal, organic qat grower and then everything would be alright)